Friends, Patriots, Countrymen

On Iraq: I find myself befuddled by what I perceive as the Left’s waging a propaganda campaign to discredit the President and the efforts underfoot to remove one who is arguably a mini-Hitler (Saddam) from power.

I suppose I’ve lived long enough to not be surprised by the left, yet these fools keep surprising me. Many of these people are highly educated, or pretend to be. It really shows the difference between book learning and common sense. I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but I no longer suspect the left has a death wish, I am certain that they do. How else can one explain such blindness in the face of the damning evidence? One thing: although they have a death wish, I will not let them take me with them. Nor do I imagine the regulars here will either.

On France (and Germany I suspect): we really can’t hold the French nor German people responsible for the foolishness of their leaders. Please remember friends, that the American people were represented by no less a fool that Bill Clinton for eight years. This is not a posting to bash Bill Clinton, I think his follies will come home to roost soon enough (and I’m not talking about his womanizing either). But the French have a sense of history and one supposes that when it comes down to doing the right thing, there would be a cultural imperative to align with the powers of enlightenment and against the sponsor (dare I say God-father?) of terrorism. It’s hard to imagine that Chirac wishes to go down in history as aligning France with Saddam Hussein. A few billion dollars of lost investment be damned, this is the West against the Powers of Darkness, damn it! Charles de Gaul, call you office!

As my posts are rare these days, I do have another item I wish to vent. I live close enough (Bill in NJ, right?) to NYC to pretty much hear their news and laments about budget deficits, needing more money, needing to raise more taxes and on and on. I am befuddled by this. Didn’t the Fed. offer the city 20 billion dollars to offset the financial burden of the carnage of 9-11? Not to be skeptical, but the cost of erecting the World Trade Center (WTC) was about 1.2 billion when it was built in the early 70s. With, say, 400% inflation, that would transmute to 4.8 or about 5 billion dollars today. What happened to the other 15 billion? I suspect it is going into "infrastructure repair" and other niceties that money can buy. My point is that, no doubt, the city planning budgets had money set aside for "infrastructure repair" before 9-11. This new Federal money would free that money for other priorities. I understand they are planning to "rebuild" the downtown Hudson waterfront with some of these funds. I think this area is ripe for a hard-nosed investigative reporter to find where the estimates, architectural planning, engineering, legal and etc. proposals are coming from and if they didn’t already exist before 9-11. Just who is accounting for all that money?

OK, one last peeve. Why would we want American troops doing the door-to-door thing in Baghdad? Are we crazy? Isn’t the West the originator of the siege? Surround the city and offer amnesty (and food and medical, and a scholarship to an American University while we’re at it) to anyone who walks out unarmed. I throw that last one in to appeal to leftist academicians, who never saw a tuition paying student they didn’t like. The majors have to be in something other than science, engineering or computers though…and no flight school either!

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